Neil Gaiman’s Wayward Manor Gets A Brief, Ghostly Trailer

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Is there anyone whose life I’d rather cast a magic spell to steal than Neil Gaiman? Not necessarily because of his books or his films or mellifluous voice, but because I want to live in a big, rambling house surrounded by books and dogs and cats and trees.

Although not a big house like the one in this new trailer for the ghost-filled Wayward Manor.

The game casts you as a ghost in a 1920’s mansion, attempting to reclaim your house from its new owners via puzzley-adventurey-Gaimany methods, discovering their story as you go along. It may or may not be like Ghost Master, which would be no bad thing.

Wayward Manor is due for release later this year. If you can’t wait, it’s available to buy in a series of Kickstarter-style reward tiers from the official site, and it’ll be on Steam in due course. But probably you should wait, because pre-ordering imminent games before you know if they’re any good is crazy.

Why Amanda is bad thing? She makes rather good music. Try Evelyn Evelyn (she and some guy are playing it pretending they’re conjoined twins which is also the theme of that album) self titled album, it’s brilliant and creepy.

He hasn’t really done anything with video games at all before, though, and I’m not convinced this is much more ‘his’ game than Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist had much to do with Tom Clancy.

I’m also slightly concerned that the game’s actual developers only heard about/played Ghost Master halfway through development of Wayward Manor (there was a Wired interview with them about it), which suggests they did no research whatsoever beforehand into ‘other games with ghosts in’.

Well, you don’t want to accidentally rip-off another game, do you? It also helps in identifying potential prat-falls; if another dev messed up with a similar feature, you should consider that before plowing ahead and risking the same mistake.

It doesn’t surprise me that they weren’t aware of Ghost Master, however, as it is a pretty obscure game despite being on Steam. Similarly, I can think of only two other games where you play as a ghost: Haunting starring Polterguy (ancient, obscure) and Geist (probably obscure). So they probably didn’t even think that overlap was possible.

Amanda Palmer is pretty amazing, frankly. I’m fairly sure that Graham would have included being married to her as one of the many appealing aspects of magically stealing Neil’s life, were it not an appallingly creepy thing to say.

I’d rip my own arm off, bleed to death, and turn into a wailing arm-brandishing spectre for more Ghost Master. If this is anything like that, I’m sold. Not to mention this sort of story is just what Gaiman’s made his name on.